Larry Niven - Flash crowd

This enthusiasm that can reach through a teevee screen to touch fifty million minds, this enthusiasm is in no way artificial. He means it. He only expresses it better than most men. He leans forward in his chair; his eyes blaze; there is harsh tension in his voice. "The breakers glow like churning blue fire! Those plankton are fluorescent. And they're all through the wet sand. Walk across it, it flashes blue light under your feet! Kick it, scuff your feet through it, it lights up. Throw a handful of sand, it flashes where it hits! This light isn't just on the surface. Stamp your foot, you can see the structure of the sand by the way it flares. You've got to see it to believe it," he says.

They will run the tape starting at eight thirty tonight.

Standard booths: how standardized?

Who makes them besides JumpShaft? Monopoly? How extensive? Skip spaceflight?

Space exploration depended utterly on teleportation. But the subject was likely to be very technical and not very useful. He could gain time by skipping it entirely. Jerryberry considered, then turned the question mark into an exclamation point.

His twelve hours had become nine.

Of the half-dozen key clubs to which he belonged, the Cave des Roys was the quietest. A place of stone and wood, a good place to sit and think. The wall behind the bar was several hundred wine bottles in a cement matrix. Jerryberry looked into the strange lights in the glass, sipped occasionally at a silver fizz, and jotted down whatever occurred to him.

Sociology. What has teleportation done to society?

Cars.

Oil companies. Oil stocks. See back issues Wall Street Journal.

Watts riot? Chicago riot? He crossed that last one out. The Chicago riot had been political, hadn't it? Then he couldn't remember any other riots. They were too far in the past. He wrote:

Riot control. Police procedure.

Crime? The crime rate should have soared after displacement booths provided the instant getaway. Had it?

Sooner or later he was going to have to drop in at police headquarters. He'd hate that, but he might learn something. Likewise the library, for several hours of dull research. Then?

He certainly wasn't going to persuade everybody to give up displacement booths:

He wrote: OBJECTIVE: Demonstrate that displacement booths imply instant riot. It's a social problem. Solve it on that basis. For the sake of honesty he added, Get 'em off my back. CROWDS. In minutes the mall had become a milling mass of men. But he'd seen crowds form almost as fast. It might happen regularly in certain places. After a moment's thought he wrote. Tahiti. Jerusalem. Mecca. Easter Island. Stonehenge. Olduvai Gorge.

He stood up. Start with the phone calls.

"Doctor Robin Whyte," Jerryberry said to the phone screen. "Please."

The receptionist at Seven Sixes was no sex symbol. She was old enough to be Jerryberry's aunt, and handsome rather than beautiful. She heard him out with a noncommittal dignity that, he sensed, could turn glacial in an instant.

"Barry Jerome Jansen," he said carefully.

He waited on hold, watching dark-red patterns flow upward in the phone screen.

Key clubs were neither new nor rare. Some were small and local; others were chains, existing in a dozen or a hundred locations. Everyone belonged to a club; most people belonged to several.

But Seven Sixes was something else. Its telephone number was known universally. Its membership, large in absolute terms, was small for an organization so worldwide. It included presidents, kings, winners of various brands of Nobel prize. Its location was-unknown. Somewhere in Earth's temperate zones. Jerryberry had never heard of its displacement booth number being leaked to anyone.

It took a special kind of gall for one of Jerryberry's social standing to dial 666-6666. He had learned that gall in journalism class. Go to the source- no matter how highly placed; be polite, be prepared to wait, but keep trying, and never, never worry about wasting the great man's time.

Funny: They still called it journalism, though newspapers had died. And the Constitution that had protected newspapers still protected "the press." For a while. But laws could change.

The screen cleared.

Robin Whyte the physicist had been a mature man of formidable reputation back when JumpShift first demonstrated teleportation. Today, twenty-five years later, he was the last living member of the team that had formed JumpShift. His scalp was pink and bare. His face was round and soft, almost without wrinkles, but slack, as if the muscles were tired. He looked like somebody's favorite grandfather.

He looked Jerryberry Jansen up and down very thoroughly. He said, "I wanted to see what you looked like." He reached for the cutoff switch.

"I didn't do it," Jerryberry said quickly.

Whyte stopped with his finger on the cutoff. "No?"

"I am not responsible for the mall riot. I hope to prove it."

The old man thought it over. "And you propose to involve me? How?"

Jerryberry took a chance. "I think I can demonstrate that displacement booths and the mall riot are intimately connected. My problem is that I don't know enough about displacement-booth technology."

"And you want my help?"

"You invented the displacement booths practically single-handed," Jerryberry said straight-faced. "Instant riots, instant getaways, instant smuggling. Are you going to just walk away from the problem?"

Robin Whyte laughed in a high-pitched voice, his head thrown way back, his teeth white and perfect and clearly false. Jerryberry waited, wondering if it would work.

"All right," Whyte said. "Come on over. Wait a minute, what am I thinking? You can't come to Seven Sixes. I'll meet you somewhere. L'Orangerie, New York City. At the bar."

The screen cleared before Jerryberry could answer. That was quick, he thought. And, Move, idiot. Get there before he changes his mind.

In New York it was just approaching cocktail hour. L'Orangerie was polished wood and dim lighting and chafing dishes of Swedish meatballs on toothpicks. Jerryberry captured a few to go with his drink. He had not had lunch yet.

Robin Whyte wore a long-sleeved gray one-piece with a collar that draped into a short cape, and the cape was all the shifting rainbow colors of an oil film. The height of fashion, except that it should have been skin-tight. It was loose all over, bagging where Whyte bagged, and it looked very comfortable. Whyte sipped at a glass of milk.

"One by one I give up my sins," he said. "Drinking was the last, and I haven't really turned loose of it yet. But almost. That's why your reverse salesmanship hooked me in. I'll talk to anyone. What do I call you?"

"Barry Jerome Jansen."

"Let me put it this way. I'm Robbie. What do I call you?"

"Oh. Jerryberry."

Whyte laughed. "I can't call anyone Jerryberry. Make it Barry."

"God bless you, sir."

"What do you want to know?"

"How big is JumpShift?"

"Ooohhh, pretty big. What's your standard of measurement?"

Jerryberry, who had wondered if he was being laughed at, stopped wondering. "How many kinds of booth do you make?"

"Hard to say. Three, for general use. Maybe a dozen more for the space industry. Those are still experimental. We lose money on the space industry. We'd make it back if we could start producing drop-ships in quantity. We've got a ship on the drawing boards that would transmit itself to any drop-ship receiver."

Jerryberry prompted him. "And three for general use, you said."

"Yes. We've made over three hundred million passenger booths in the past twenty years. Then there's a general-use cargo booth. The third model is a tremendous portable booth for shipping really big, fragile cargoes. Like a prefab house or a rocket booster or a live sperm whale. You can set the thing in place almost anywhere, using three strap-on helicopter setups. I didn't believe it when I saw it." Whyte sipped at his milk. "You've got to remember that I'm not in the business anymore. I'm still chairman of the board, but a bunch of younger people give most of the orders, and I hardly ever get into the factories."